Jem

ELEVEN

MARGE MENNINGER’S HAIR was no longer blond. The name on her passport was not Margie Menninger. According to her travel orders, she was now a major, en route to a new duty station; and although the orders authorized a delay en route, it was unlikely that the general who signed them had contemplated that it would be spent in Paris.

In the little room of her hotel she fidgeted over the so-called croissant and what passed for orange juice, and phoned down to the concierge to see if the message she was expecting had arrived.

“I regret it, Meez Bernardi, but there is nothing,” sighed the concierge. Marge took another bite of the croissant and gave it up. France was nominally part of the Food Bloc — by the skin of its teeth, and by the relabeling of Algerian wine for export — but you couldn’t prove it by what they gave you for breakfast.

She was tired of this room, with its leftover smells of khef and sexual athletics from its previous occupants. She wanted to move around and couldn’t. And while she was fretting away time in this room, the Peep ships were going through pre-launch, the training of backup crews for the next Food Bloc mission was limping along without her, and God only knew what disasters were taking place in Washington and at the UN.

She abandoned the breakfast and dressed quickly. When she came downstairs, of course there was a message at the concierge’s desk, on a flimsy blue slip of paper:

Miss Hester Bernardi will be picked up at 1500 hours for her appointment.

It had obviously been there all along. Margie did not bother to reprimand the concierge; she would take care of that at tipping time. She pushed her way out into the Rue Caumartin, deciding what to do next. Six hours to kill! And for the life of her she could not think of any productive use to make of them.

It was a warm, drizzly day. The stink of gasoline drenched the air over the Place de l’Opera. Food Bloc or not, France was cozy with the Ay-rabs, as well as with the Peeps. That was another reason you could not trust the frogs, Margie thought darkly. One of her grandfathers had marched into this city in Wehrmacht gray, and the other, in the opposite direction a few years later, in American olive drab, and both of them had passed on to her their feelings about the French. They were inconstant allies and unreliable subjects, and the few who ever seemed to have any sense of national purpose usually wound up having their heads shaved or chopped by the many who did not. In Margie’s view, the French were not a bit better than the English, the Spanish, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Asians, the Africans, the Latins — and about ninety percent of the Americans too, when you came right down to it.

But the immediate problem was not what was wrong with humanity, but what she could do with this day. There was only one answer. She could do the thing most American women came to Paris to do. She could shop.

She not only could shop, she must; it was the best way of avoiding attention. She not only must, she wanted to.

It was one of Margie’s most closely guarded secrets that periodically she went on shopping binges, out of one store and into another, pricing fabric, trying on dresses, matching shoes with gowns. In her little Houston apartment there were two closets, plus half of what was meant to be a guest room, filled with her purchases. They were thrown jumbled onto shelves, pushed under a bed in their original store bags: sweaters she would never wear, material half-sewn into drapes that would never be hung. Her living room was spartan, and her bedroom was always immaculate, because you never knew who might drop in. But the secret rooms were part of the hidden personality of Margie Menninger. None of what she bought was very expensive. It was not because she was economical. She had unaccounted funds at her disposal, and the prices never mattered. But her taste was for quantity rather than quality. Periodically she would wage war against the overflow, and then for awhile Goodwill and the Salvation Army would fatten off her discards. But a week later the hoard would have grown again.

Margie did not bother with the tourist traps along the Champs Йlysйes or with the tucked-away boutiques. Her tastes were for stores like Printemps, Uniprix, and the Galeries Lafayette. The only fly in the ointment was that she could not buy anything. She could not carry it where she was going and did not want to attract attention by leaving it, so she tried on, and she priced, and for six hours she made the lives of a score of Parisian shopgirls a living hell. That didn’t bother Margie Menninger at all. By the time the taxicab picked her up at her hotel, punctually on the tick of three o’clock, her good nature was restored. She leaned back against the hard plastic seat of the cab, ready for what was to come next.

The driver stopped at the Place Vendome long enough for another passenger to jump in. Behind tourist shades was the face of her father, which was no surprise to Margie.

“Bonjour, honey,” he said. “I brought you your toy.”

She took the camera he offered her and hefted it critically. It was heavier than it looked; she would have to be careful not to let anyone else pick it up.

“Don’t try to take pictures with it,” he said, “because it won’t. Just hang it around your neck on the strap. Then, when you get where you’re going” — he pushed the shutter lever, and the casing opened to reveal a dull metal object inside — “this is what you give your contact. Along with a hundred thousand petrodollars. They’re in the carrying case.”

“Thank you, poppa.”

He twisted in the seat to look at her. “You’re not going to tell your mother that I let you do this, are you?”

“Christ, no. She’d have a shit hemorrhage.”

“And don’t get caught,” he added as an afterthought. “Your contact was one of Tam Gulsmit’s best people, and he is going to be really ticked off when he finds out we turned him. How are things going at Camp Detrick?”

“Good shape, poppa. You get me the transport, I’ll send some good people.”

He nodded. “We’ve had a little lucky break,” he offered. “The Peeps fired on one of our guys. No harm done, but it makes a nice incident.”

“Didn’t he fire back, for Christ’s sake?”

“Not him! It was your old jailhouse buddy, the one from Bulgaria. As near as I can tell, he doesn’t believe in the use of force. Anyway, he did exactly what I would have told him to do. He got the hell out of there and reported back to the UN peacekeeping force, and he had tapes and pictures to prove what he said.” He peered out the window. They had crossed the Seine. Now they were creeping through heavy traffic in a working-class neighborhood. “This is where I get out. See you in Washington, love. And take care of yourself.”

Early the next morning Margie was in Trieste. She was not Hester Bernardi anymore, but she wasn’t Marge Menninger either. She was a sleepy Swiss-Italian housewife in a sweaty pantsuit, driving to the Yugoslav border in a rented Fiat electrocar with a crowd of other Sunday-morning shoppers looking for cheap vegetables and bargains in Yugoslavian kitchen-ware. Unlike them, she drove straight through to Zagreb, parked the car and took a bus to the capital.

When she reached Belgrade, the object her father had given her was at the bottom of a plastic shopping bag with an old sweater and a shabby pocketbook on top of it. And she had had very little sleep.

Margie could not have grown up in the household of Godfrey Menninger without learning the easy dialogue of espionage. In all the world, she was the only person with whom her father had always been open. First because she was too little to understand, and so he could speak freely in her presence. Then because she had to understand. When the PLO kidnapped her she had been terrified past the point a four-year-old can survive, and her father’s patient explanations had been the only thing that let her make sense of the terror. And finally, because he trusted her to understand, always, that the grotesque and lethal things he did had a purpose. He never questioned that she shared that purpose. So she had grown up in an atmosphere of drops and liquidations and couriers and double agents, at the center of a web that stretched all around the world.

But now she was not at the center of the web; she was out where the risks were immense and the penalties drastic. She walked quickly down the busy streets, avoiding eye contact. The closet-sized shops had their doors open, and confusing smells came out of them: a knifelike aroma of roasting meat from a dressmaker’s (when had she eaten last?), the sting of unwashed armpits from what seemed to be a costume-jewelry boutique. She crossed, dodging a tram, and saw the office she was looking for. The sign said Electrotek Miinschen, and it was over a sweatshop where fat, huge men in T-shirts worked at belt-driven sewing machines.

She checked her watch. There was more than an hour before her first possible contact. The man she needed to meet was a short, slim Italian who would be wearing a football blazer with the name of the Skopje team. Of course, no one like that was in sight yet — even if he turned up for the first rendezvous, which her father had warned was unlikely.

Down the block there was a cluster of roofed sheds surrounding a gabled two-story building that looked like any American suburban town’s leftover railroad station. A farmers’ market? It seemed to be something like that. Margie pushed her way through crowds of women in babushkas and women in minifrocks, men in blue smocks carrying crates of pink new potatoes on their shoulders, and men with a child on each hand, studying counters of chocolates and jellies. It was a satisfyingly busy mob. She was not conspicuous there.

She was, however, hungry.

Strawberries seemed to be in season. Margie bought half a kilo and a bottle of Pepsi and found a seat on a stone balustrade next to an open suitcase full of screwdrivers and cast-aluminum socket wrenches. What Margie wanted most was a hamburger, but no one seemed to be selling anything like that. But others were eating strawberries, and Margie was confident she looked like any one of them, or at least, if not like them, like some housewife who might have stopped en route to any ordinary destination to refresh herself.

At two punctually she was back in front of Electrotek Mьnchen, studying a Belgrade bus guide as instructed. No short, slim Italian appeared. Twice she caught snatches of words that seemed to be in English, but when she looked up from her bus guide and glanced casually in that direction, she could not tell which of the passersby had spoken. She pitched the bus guide into a corner sewer and walked angrily away. The second appointment was not until ten o’clock at one of the big old luxury hotels, and what in God’s name was she going to do until then?

She had to keep moving. It was very hard to stroll for more than seven hours, however many Camparis and soda you are willing to stop and drink. God bless, she passed something that called itself, in Cyrillic letters, an Expres-Restoran, and when she realized that it was a cafeteria, one problem at least was solved. She pointed at something that looked like roast chicken and probably was, and with the mashed potatoes and bread that went with it, at least she was full. Full of time. She emptied herself of as much of it as she could: a stroll through the botanical gardens, a long window-shopping stroll down the Boulevard Marshal Tito. And then it began to rain. She retreated into a bioskop and watched a Czech comedy with Serbo-Croatian subtitles until nine. The only problem was staying awake; but when she got to the hotel there was a real problem. Ghelizzi did not show up there either.

By now she was almost dizzy with fatigue, her clothes were sweaty and rain-stained, and she was sure she was beginning to smell. Poppa had not really thought these arrangements through, she thought with some bitterness. It should have occurred to him that the waiters at the hotel bar would not fail to notice a sweaty, dirty foreign woman among all their marble and their string trios. If she had been a man, it might not have mattered. A man could have been checking out the hotel whores — the skinny, dark-at-the-roots blond playing solitaire by the fireplace, the plump one with the bright red hair who had left the aperitif lounge twice in one hour, with different men, and was back again, ready for the next. Margie refused another Campari and sent the waiter for a Turkish coffee. The next appointment was not until the following afternoon, and where would she sleep?

The whores had rooms. If she had been one of them…

The idea did not disturb Margie in any moral way, but it took only a second for her to discard it as impractical. Even if she had a room, the waiters would surely throw her out to protect the existing monopoly the first time she looked toward one of the solitary males. They were already looking at her with interest and beginning to take the cloths off some of the tables in the farther end of the room.

Margie picked up her coffee and moved to the table of the streaked blond. She spoke to her in English, confident that in a tourist hotel the girls would be fluent in the necessary words in any major language.

“How much for all night?” she asked.

The blond looked scandalized. “For yourself? How disgusting! I could not possibly do such a thing with a woman.”

“Fifty dinars.”

“One hundred.”

“All right, one hundred. But I have very special tastes, and you must do exactly as I ask.”

The blond looked skeptical, then shrugged and signaled the waiter. “First you must buy me a real Scotch whiskey while you explain what these tastes are. Then we will see.”

In the morning Margie woke up refreshed. She used the whore’s tiny shower to get clean, dressed quickly and paid the woman off with a smile.

“May I ask a question?” the whore offered, counting the money.

“I can’t stop you from asking.”

“This thing you had me do, simply rubbing your neck each time you woke until you fell asleep again? Is that truly satisfying to you?”

“You wouldn’t believe how satisfying,” smiled Margie. She strolled grandly out of the hotel, nodding politely to the local police in their baggy gray uniforms open at the neck, hands on the guns in the cardboard holsters. A few blocks down the boulevard took her to the London Cafe, and there, nursing a beer at one of the indoor tables, was the slim, short Italian wearing a Skopje football cap.

She sat down and ordered a coffee, then visited the women’s w.c. When she came back the Italian was gone. The bag she had left on her chair did not appear to be disturbed, but her exploring fingers told her the camera was gone, and in its place was a guide folder about the hovercraft cruise to the Iron Gorge.

She made her way back across the border the same way she had come. By the time she was in Trieste again and able to resume the identity of the Swiss-Italian housewife, she was fully restored. On the clamjet to Paris she locked herself in the toilet and studied the contents of the travel folder.

How Ghelizzi had come to be a person of trust in Sir Tam’s army of spies was beyond her; he had not impressed her as being the sort of man one would repose faith in. But he had delivered the goods this time. The little device was on its way, and the complete file of secret tactran messages between Earth and the Fuel Bloc camp on Klong was in her hands in microfiche. Her father would be very proud.